myartspace is the premier online venue for the contemporary art world. The community includes established artists, emerging artists, aspiring artists, collectors, curators, teachers, galleries, art appreciators.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Understanding the Impact of Social Networking

Understanding the Impact of Social Networking

Social networking is a powerful tool for building vast influence and power. This power will be exploited by a new generation of emerging artists to build their commercial success and reputation.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

The Internet has evolved over the past 10 years. It began as a place where web surfing, email and online purchasing were the primary usage patterns. It is now shifting, in what is often referred to as “Web 2.0” as a vehicle for social networking. The bottom line – information travels very rapidly around the globe. The magnitude of the Internet, the speed in which information travels, and the potential response from tens or hundreds of thousands of socially-linked users is quite amazing to all and understood by few today.

Some Examples…

Skype, an online Internet phone-service provider was acquired by eBay in 2005. At the time it was bought, Skype was adding 150,000 new subscribers per day. They had amassed almost 60 million users in 200+ countries in a matter of less than 2 years and for less than $20 million in spending.

YouTube today counts more than 9 million users. Daily users upload 35,000 videos and view 30 million each and every day! As Eric Kintz pointed out in his blog, In October 2005, Nike produced a pseudo home digital video of soccer star Ronaldinho, practicing while wearing his new Nike Gold shoes. The clip was downloaded 3.5 million times on YouTube and provided Nike with tremendous exposure to its core young male audience.

MySpace, a social networking site, grew from 6 million members to more than 80 million members in a matter of 18 months. The most popular myspace user, known as Tila Tequila has over 1 million friends she is linked to.

It is estimated that a new blog is created in the world every 7.4 seconds, which implies 12,000 new blogs per day. Over 400,000 posts are made to blogs every day, which translates to one every 4 seconds. And those reading blogs far outnumber those posting to them in most cases.

When myartspace published a press release about the competition on July 5th it was picked up and read by 26,000 within 6 hours.

The power of the network

Developing a social network is hard work that consumes time. It also has the potential to pay huge dividends and be a source of incredible leverage and support. Mostly simple math is at work in a social network. Let’s say, for instance, that I have 50 friends that I email. In turn, they each mail 50 additional friends on average, who in turn do the same. My single email that was copied to 50 people is now in the hands of 125,000 people before lunch. While it’s very unlikely that exact scenario would unfold, and undoubtedly many of those email would end up in the trash or spam folder, the point should be clear. Developed social networks are powerful.

In Conclusion

MyArtSpace hopes to help people develop large and successful social networks so that they can have a large following of their art. Though there are only about 700 galleries online today on myartspace, these galleries have been viewed over 100,000 times in the past few weeks. It is our hope that an artist can upload their latest work on myartspace, have it viewed by tens of thousands of people over a matter of days or weeks, and if they wish, sell hundreds of print copies of that work, Myartspace strives to make that happen by helping develop the fastest growing online community for artists and photographers in the world.